A Stage On Our Lawn, pt. 1

This is the first in a potential series of posts about There’s a Stage on My Lawn, a DIY music festival presented this weekend by Lyndzapalooza (LP).

In past years planning for a LP festival has effectively consisted of the eponymous Lindsay and myself trading frequent, frantic emails about everything from sound design to fine points of invitation etiquette, increasingly including Dante Bucci as the event approached, and culminating in a massive equipment order from Musician’s Friend to ensure we’d be able to amplify all of our artists.

For five years it’s resulted in a full day of music with nary a hiccup.

However, even sans hiccups the production of last year’s Evolve festival was one of the most overwhelming tasks I’ve ever taken on, privately or professionally. I can’t speak for Lindsay or Dante, but my role had expanded from engineering sound for the event to also include interviewing artists, working on our web presence, drafting schedules, and printing our 16-page program – and that’s just what I was doing the week before the event!

After Evolve was over we kept coming back to the word. I originally egged on Lindsay to choose it for the fortuitous synergy with our roman numeral V, but the festival wound up as a serious improvement over previous years. Yet, should our evolution really cease with two stages and an inclement weather hotline?

In my mind it was meant to be indicative of something more – that LP was going to be more than just a once-a-year party, both to our audience and to our musicians.

Lindsay and Dante agreed, and “evolve” quickly became our mantra. After the event we compiled a massive list of post-mortem items – over 100 topics amassed in two long-ranging meetings between the three of us, plus Lindsay’s partner (and now my co-worker) Kate.

The four of us were enthusiastic and optimistic, but once the list was compiled we realized that LP had grown a lot larger than just the four of us. We wanted everything to get bigger and better, including hosting a future spring festival at a local farm, but we could see the limitations of our time and resources looming ahead.

We evolved some more. We established a board of eight Directors, adding more science-minded friends to our media-savvy foursome. From underwriting to applications chemistry, our newly formed octet ran the gamut of backgrounds and influences, and was more than well-equipped to push LP even further in 2008 and beyond.

A scant five days out from this event and I’m amazed by how far we’ve come in less than a year, but I’ll get into those details in my next post.

I hope that if you live in the Philadelphia area you’ll find a chance this Saturday to check out There’s a Stage on My Lawn! You can purchase discounted tickets on the web through Friday, or buy at the door for $12. That’s less than the price of a new CD for over seven hours of original, local, live music!

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